Node keeps running happily in the background, but you can’t start it again because its still holding on to the port.
We need to kill the node process. This as simple as running the command to list all running processing, and ‘grepping’ the result to only include node, think of grep as a simple find in.
ps aux | grep node

That’ll list all your node processes. You can then type kill and the id number, which comes just after the user running node in the second column. Your actual search for node will show up in the process list too! So if you look at the right most column you’ll see grep node, which is your search. You can’t actually kill that because its already finished, so a kill and the id number will just produce a no such process and cause no harm.

The new year is a good excuse to enable a new theme. I downloaded a ThemeHall theme and tweaked it a bit.

I wanted to have a twitter link in the WordPress ‘Tagline’ but it escapes all HTML, I’ve modified the theme to allow it, but not cleanly. I wonder if there’s a nice way?

The new theme installation gave me an excuse to test a plugin I’ve been wanting create. A full background image ‘mega compressor’ that fades nicely into the full high res image once loaded. My aim is to get the initial page load to be fast, but without the annoying background image pop-in.

I initially wanted to simply set a background image in css, load the high-res one in JavaScript then set the background-image of the body to the high res one. The browser would then use the CSS3 transition to animate it nicely. Unfortunately only Chrome supports doing transitions on the background-image element. Never mind. You can see an example of Chrome Background-image transitions

So I’ve had to use jQuery to create a temporary div, that’s set to the low res, and then faded out over the body with the high res image. Its live on this blog, you can do a few force refreshes to see it in action.

The actual JavaScript isn’t really the bit I was most interested in, it was actually the server side where it would automatically blur and mega compress an image, send that to the client and automatically fade in the high res on load.

jQuery code below, remember to set body to the initial low resolution image using CSS.

The Code of Christmas is Koa, a Node.js middleware. It’s created by the same people as Express, and it seems this is the direction the developers want to take. Its hard to tell at the moment if Express will be continually developed or if you will need to move to Koa.

By far the largest change is the use of generators, this removes the usual ‘Callback hell’ that express apps can face. They say that performance very similar, but reading and writing code is much improved. The main problem I see with this, is that generators are so new in JavaScript you need to run node with the –harmony flag.

Its only recommended you use Koa for new projects, as it will be a lot of work moving express apps over.

I’m going to stick with express until Koa has been out a little longer, and hopefully can be run without any additional flags being needed to be set.

This week it’s PhantomJS the headless web browser. It’s based on Webkit and programmed in JavaScript. Perfect for wide range of uses: testing, crawling, scraping.

Easy to install download the pre-complied binary and then launch from the terminal, or use one of the many libraries that plug it into other languages.

I’ve used it recently to take a screen shot of a JavaScript rendered web page, the screen shot is used as a thumbnail. You simply tell PhantomJS to load the URL, wait for a certain number of seconds, or even better wait for a DOM element to be created/changed, take the screenshot to a png, done.

There are so many uses for a full rendering JavaScript executing headless browser I will post up some code examples soon.

Renamed from, ‘Sublime Paste Insert Plugin’ as @andrejkvasnica quite rightly pointed out, its actually like typing when insert is turned off. The new name is ‘Sublime Paste Overwrite Plugin’ which better describes what it does anyway as well as being accurate.

Myke sent an email around asking if knew about a Sublime plugin that would delete as many characters as in the clipboard. Like typing with the insert button off.

No-one did, and googling didn’t reveal anything. So I made one, it wasn’t that difficult and not many lines of code.

Dragging and dropping a file from one window to another, and the path of this drag moves over a network location, CD drive, or other slow location. Of course windows tries to look in this location, to be helpful and freezes the drag operation, and puts windows explorer into a non responding state.

Even though you didn’t drop it in that location. Happens annoying frequently.